Industrial modes of production in the arts of the global north in the 20th and 21st centuries. Studies in art and factories

• Applicant: Dr. Kathrin Rottmann
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508930320

Parallel to the process of industrialisation and deindustrialisation, industrial modes of processing and production were transferred to the arts. The aim of this research project is to explore historically and systematically the industrial modes of production in the art of the global North in the 20th and 21st centuries by means of exemplary studies. Artistic modes of production are situated in social modes of production and, this thesis argues, are used to negotiate the status of artistic production in industrial society. Industrial modes of production are particularly suitable for these negotiations because they seem to be the very antithesis of artistic production due to alienated machine and mass labour. The project will work out a historical-critical analysis of how and under what socio-political and gender-political conditions the production processes were transferred from the factory to art, what consequences these transfers had for the theory and practice of the visual arts and what gender codings of production, biological reproduction and care work were effective in the process. The period of investigation from the 1920s to the present encompasses the historical contexts relevant to the relationship between industrial and artistic production in the global North: the 1920s/30s, when industrial labour was considered a model of rationalised, progressive labour in the visual arts as well; the 1960s/70s, when it came to epitomise unemployment, while the flexibility and creativity attributed to artistic labour became a model for alienated labour; and the 2000s, when industrial production was discussed in the context of digitalisation and immaterial labour. In precise terms, the project aims by means of selected examples 1) to make the modes of production of the artworks and the work of all the actors visible on the basis of written and pictorial sources and the results of the history of technology, 2) to identify the tools, materials, procedures and techniques, taking into account their respective historical and social use, 3) to reveal the socio-political and gender-political conditions of the artistic modes of production, in order 4) on the basis of this nuanced historical-critical and gender-critical analysis to open up new readings of concrete artworks and artistic modes of production. Methodologically, the project makes a fundamental contribution for art history to the question of what role the modes of production of artefacts play for their perception and reception and how the modes of production and the work contained therein are to be methodically taken into account. Thus, it provides an approach to the visual arts that anchors the study of modes of production in the analysis of socio-cultural goods.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants